Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is retrofuturism's most literal act of resurrection: a film built to look exactly like a lost 1939 pulp serial, using technology that didn't exist until the 21st century to do it. Every frame's background — the robot-ravaged Manhattan skyline, the art-deco airships, the tropical hidden fortress — was generated digitally, with Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie acting almost entirely alone in front of blue screens; director Kerry Conran, working from a proof-of-concept short he'd animated himself over years, built the whole world around them afterward.

The film's deliberately desaturated sepia-and-blue color grading and its robot and set designs lean directly on the 1941 Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons — several shots are near shot-for-shot homages — filtered through the pulp-adventure serials and the 1939 New York World's Fair's own vision of "the world of tomorrow." It's a film about a future imagined by the past, made using a future its own characters could never have imagined, and the layered irony is very much the point.

Commercially, it flopped hard against its considerable visual-effects budget, and critics were split on whether the story matched the craft on display. But as a pure feat of virtual-production filmmaking — an entire feature shot on a soundstage with nothing but actors and props, everything else built afterward — it remains a genuine landmark, one that the entire modern volume-stage and LED-wall production industry can trace a direct lineage back to.